Animated audition a short slap stick test

Here is an audition I did for a job at the start of the year. The mail came out of the blue on the 3rd of January "We would like you to complete the audition ASAP".  I was given a version of the model to work on by the company but the rigg didn't work and the mesh had errors and too much subdivision to skin easily so I had to rebuild and re-rigged it. It was a bit of a mad rush to get it done in time but good practice. I always liked cartoons like Road Runner and the Pink Panther so it was fun to do something slap stick. One of the best things about it was I showed it to my kids and they loved it. I  really enjoyed doing the animation and hope you enjoy watching it , I haven't done something like this for a while so it made a nice change.



It's a little bit like the style I used to work in when I worked for Kuju on the Eye Toy games, I have an urge to try doing some more work like this as it came very easy to me. The swords and sorcery stuff I'm working on at the moment is a bit of a battle at times. The funny green thing I animated for the audition was much easier to set up and build than the characters I've been making recently. With a bit of Z-brush fiddling it could look really cool I think.



The clip above was a style test I did for Kuju.

Flame Troll #2 Armor texture and surface sculpt

Proto Troll needs texture love

Back to the Flame Troll and this is where I left it last time; an early base mesh for a full plate armored suit. Some skin tests done to check the mesh, I got the troll walking around, textures are placeholder tests and no real UV mapping done at this stage. The Troll is fully articulated without too much fancy rigging.

My next step was the UV map, for this I use a mix of Maya and Z-Brush UV Master. I sort out my UV islands in Maya first then I go into Z-Brush and Use the UV Master plugin for a straightforward flatten but keeping my UV islands, I generally end up re-positioning the layout of the UVs in Maya at the end to tidy up. A bizarre mechanical job but it has to be done. Below you can see the entire armor suit except for the shoulder, elbow and knee pads which I put on a separate texture page. I always snap shot my UVs before I go into texturing so I have an overlay which shows me where and what I'm painting. Sensible layout of the UVs also helps with this so for example at the top of the page in the middle are all the Troll's fingers. It makes it easier to paint if elements of the model are where you expect them to be, otherwise you have to cross reference with Maya to track down what you want to paint. Although there is generally an unavoidable period where you need to familiarise yourself with your new UV map.

 Once the UVs were out the way I took the model into Z-Brush and started sculpting. I quickly discovered that I could not get the level of detail I wanted with out hitting the poly limit for my machine so I had to divide the model up into several sections. In this way I could go to the maximum poly limit on each separate piece and so have an overall poly limit that was much higher. The body had 6 separate sections in the end which were: arms, chest plate, gauntlets, legs and additional armor plates.


Below you can see work in progress normal maps on the model. What I usually do is set up with Xnormal so I can drop my normal maps onto the model as I am adjusting my sculpt in Z-Brush so the screen grabs below are from Maya. It means swapping around between software which is a drag. When I first started using normal maps I would do all my sculpting, finish it and then generate my normal maps and drop them into Maya. This means less messing about but can lead to unforeseen errors which you can catch if you check your work as you're creating it. I find it less of a headache to keep an eye on any developing problems as I'm working rather than get all the way through the sculpt and then have a nasty surprise.

The mat version above is an earlier version than the shiny silver version below. If you look closely you can see there are lots of blank areas on the armor in the pictures above and below which I filled in later, like the phoenix that I sculpted into the centre of the breast plate. These pictures show the model with just a base one tone colour applied to it. All the rivets and gubbins are coming from the normal map.

 Below you can see the separate sections sculpted in Z-Brush. I really liked the Phoenix design I came up with for this characters breast plate, I decided that I wanted the Troll to have a magic flaming spear and that he needed an emblem of fire to go on his armor. I doodled out a phoenix holding the rune for fire on a scrap of paper and then transferred it to the armor using Z-Brush (by eye). You can find all sorts of runes and ancient symbols by checking the internet and it can be lots of fun researching this kind of thing. Or you can just use your imagination.

 

Once my sculpt was done it was time to move on to the texture painting. Below you can see the model before I started really going into the painting so you're just seeing the detail of the sculpt transferred onto the model through a normal map. The result is a very  beaten up surface that seems peculiarly clean and plastic, time to get painting!

Back view ready for painting

I set a simple pose for rendering so I can check my work as I paint

 

 

 

Here are some details from the texture sheet, these are the hand painted flat images that I mapped to the model to complete it. You can see the Phoenix breast plate and one of the shoulder plates, these flat images work in combination with the surface sculpt to give the impression that dirt has caught in the recesses and that the corners and raised areas have been scratched  and battered. I use an ambient occlusion map as a starting point to paint from. It often helps the model to paint in details that are not in the sculpt so you should not stick too rigidly to the ambient occlusion, (within reason of course).

Again  as I'm painting I am constantly checking the results in Maya and running off the odd render.

So there you have it one flame Troll in a suit of long serving battle worn armor, complete with sigils and magic seals.

 We are not done yet though as next will come the spear.

Alien Invader How to strip the rigg

I've been asked how to strip the rigg from the Alien Invader model and thought I might as well share it here.
If you need to strip the rigg from the Alien Invader model in order to create a fresh rigg or assign motion capture to the model using something like motion builder, here is how you do it. If you have the Cyber Punk, Cyborg or Space Soldier you can use the same process, the only difference will be the node prefix. For the Cyber punk the prefix will be CyberPunk, for Cyborg the prefix is Cyborg and for the Space Soldier the prefix is SpaceTrooper. You can find these and many other of my character models here for download on Turbosquid.

A character for animation has three components:

mesh
skeleton
controllers

In order to create a new rigg or new set of controllers you need to strip out the old controllers including IK, control handles and constraints leaving you with just the skeleton and mesh(s). This model also has duplicate skeletons for the arms which are part of the IK/FK switching set up which makes them controls. They are also removed in the steps below.

Step one separate mesh and skeleton from controllers.

Go to frame zero (this is the bind pose). Open the hypergraph find and select node AlienJntAss middle mouse and hold, drag out to the side release. Find and select node AlienMesh middle mouse and hold, drag out to the side release. Find and select node AlienLP33LaserRifle middle mouse and hold, drag out to the side release.

When you middle mouse drag out a node like this in the hypergraph what you're actually doing is pulling the node and it's children out of the hierarchy and creating a new hierarchy tree. Pulling out the wrong node can really mess up a character model.

Step two delete controllers

Select nodes under node AlienLP33LaserRifle delete. Select node AlienMaster, delete. Find and select node AlienBrainConrtol, delete. Find and select node AlienJntBrain, set rotate Z to Zero.

Step three delete animation

Stripping the rig breaks the animation. You need to remove the broken animation to have a clean model for re rigging. Select every node in the skeleton make sure you have every node. A quick way to do this is to marquee select the skeleton hierarchy in the hypergraph (make sure all joint nodes are visible in the hypergraph before doing this). Now open the graph editor zoom out and make sure all keys are visible select all keys from frame 6 onwards, delete.

Step four optional clean up

You have now stripped the controllers. There are some handles which are left over, if you want to remove these too the cross handles are a display option. Select the node with a cross handle, open the attribute editor, in the display options set display handle to off. For the remaining nurbs handles in the hypergraph right click in empty space >option>display>shape nodes. You will now see that the joints have the nurbs handles assigned to them as shape nodes, you can delete them. They have generic names like CTRL_circle6Shape or curveShape3. An animator would not normally have access to these shape nodes which is why they are not labeled.

Hide the shape nodes through the display options once you have finished editing. You do not want the shape nodes visible for normal use of the hypergraph as it doubles the number of visible nodes.

Note the skeleton joints are named so you should get an idea of what the joint does straight away. You are left with just the character mesh, rifle and skeleton. The model is now ready for a new rigg.

For rigging tips and best practice I recommend Jason Schleifer. I will be back with more from the Flame Troll shortly.

Flame Troll #1 Head and body test

Happy new year to my readers. I have been working on this troll model for some time now but I haven't got round to updating the old web log about it. You may have noticed that I added it to my blog as an animated button over in the right margin. Here is a bit about how I built his head and some of the journey of building his body.

I started the troll thinking I would use it as a sprite. It was intended as just a head that floated around biting things. My first step was to build a low poly base mesh that I would use for Z-Brush sculpting and to create morph targets/ blend shapes for a character capable of facial animation.

 

At some point I ended up thinking maybe this would make a cool full character model and built a body for the character. I was planning on a fairly conventional troll other than being a cyclops, big, brutish with a loin cloth or troll pants to keep him from being too scary.

 

  However feature creep started and I began messing about with some heavy duty bracers. Sculpting Armor and metal surfaces is something that I have not managed to get working to my satisfaction with Z-Brush so I started fiddling with it. I built a few bracers and played with sculpting the surfaces in Z-Brush, I got some results that I was pleased with and so........I decided to scrap the whole body and try making an entire suit of armor for the troll. You may remember I had plans for an armored orc a while back, I only built the leather armored version and I always wanted to return to it. Ok I'm getting a little ahead of myself as the first thing I worked up was the head.

 

 I took the head into Z-Brush and sculpted it to a high level of detail. I then exported a lower poly version out to Maya as an obj file Which I used for texturing normal mapping and  for the morph targets/ blend shapes. Above you can see the wire frame and a render from that model with the details exported to a normal map. Below are the different versions of the head which are used to create the different expressions for the model. I sculpted them in Z-Brush which worked pretty well. In the past I would have done them in Maya on the low poly base mesh shown higher up the page.

 

 Below you can see how combinations of these basic blends can be used to put expression onto the character. The left image is the base pose. The open jaw is using a jaw bone and skinning as are the ears. The teeth, tongue and eye are separate models that I actually ended up creating the normals for separately. I've had lots of stuff going on in between working on this model and it seems there have been more than the usual number of hiccups with creating him. There have been multiple interviews and auditions cropping up so I've had to drop work on the troll many times.

 Below is the Z-brush model of the head, you can see the eye and tongue masked out there as well. The red brown colour is the default Z-Brush material. I export the head only from this file for normal map generation using X-normal. If you try to do it all together as one model any intersection with the model will cause an ugly mess. with this model there is intersection with the eye ball and where the gums go into the head. I've put more detail than I usually do into this troll so you can see there is some fine detail on the skin, it is barely noticeable on the Maya version but you can tell if it's turned off. One of those details that is barely noticeable but somehow gives the character a little more life. My plan with this model was to push myself. I always seem to hold back on the polygons and that has happened with this model too. The reason being well.... basically I need a new computer, when I'm animating I like to have a good frame rate so I can see what I'm doing, for a good frame rate I need a relatively low poly model or of course.... a shiny new machine.

And then it all went a little bit armored. This is an early base mesh for a full plate armored suit. I did some skin tests and got the troll walking around, the textures are placeholder tests there was no UV mapping done at this stage, I just wanted to see if I could get him fully articulated without too much fancy rigging fuss and I will tell you more about that in my next post.

 

Spooks For Haloween

 It's Halloween so lets have some ghouls and ghosties! Always a favorite subject for me and some of these character illustrations are actually very old. I've been meaning to put them online where people can see them for some time. You of course have to have pumpkins for Halloween but also skeletons so why not put the two together? Add a dash of pirate and that's about as good a mix of ingredients as I can think of.

Here is a creepy demon gargoyle affair with glowing red eyes for good measure. I have recently been doing lots of sprite renders for a game I'm working on. This means I basically set off batches of character renders and then wait to set the next lot off, rinse and repeat. It's not the most exciting job so to keep my brain busy I decided to work on some characters for a Halloween blog post and that's why this beaky fellow came into being.

The ghost pirates come from the pre-production of an Eyetoy game I worked on. It eventually became Astro Zoo so no ghosts no pirates and definitely no ghost pirates. There were squirrels in space suits but at that stage of production I was back to building and animating not painting. I did really like the characters and would have liked to have built them but that's just how it goes. There was a lot of game built and some quite cool characters before Sony decided they wanted a zoo in space instead. As far as I remember the game was a Ghostbusters sort of thing where you played the agents that dealt with the ghosts.

 

Some sketches of the ghost pirates in different positions.

Lastly another one I did while waiting on my renders, a cartoon wolfman. I was thinking about this the other day, it used to be that I would constantly doodle. When I started out in 3d animation I would have a sketch pad next to me and I would sketch my key poses out but also just doodle, because well.... there was a pad there. These days unless it's something really difficult to animate I don't need to sketch my key poses so I don't have a sketch pad on my desk. I've got my tablet of course but firing up Photoshop just to do a doodle just doesn't happen (unless I'm rendering of course). Doodles were most of my creative output when I was at school. Drawing was what I did to take my mind off things. These days I occasionally  draw something for my kids but doodling has hit an all time low and I didn't even notice.

I think part of it is that I'm very critical of my own work and I think about what I'm going to achieve with my next project. What's it for? what will I get out of it? This may be obvious but the trouble with my approach is it slightly sucks the fun out of it. I always aim to take on work that will be fun for me because it's hard to do a good job if you aren't interested in what you're working on. I know that from experience and always keep it in mind. However doodles are just thinking out loud. They serve no purpose, that's what allows them to be so free and fun. You can't doodle wrong because how can something be wrong if it serves no purpose?

What's it for? what will I get out of it? That is not what you ask yourself as you doodle on a scrap of paper, but you can get an awful lot from doodling. For starters it's good drawing exercise, but also if you are doodling while you're mind is focused elsewhere (talking on the phone, in a lecture etc) it allows your subconscious to take the wheel. This can lead to some great ideas. I think I need to get back to my doodles.

Space Trooper poly character model

 Here is a character model I've been working on in the background for some time. You may remember previously in Deranged Scratchings I put forward the character design for a Space Trooper but readers wanted me to build an alien with his brain in a jar and his eye on a stalk. I of course sympathized with this point of view and was happy to build said alien. I did however harbor a sneaking suspicion that there might be more of a demand for space soldiers than cooky looking aliens (I know heart breaking right?) and have been spending some time getting my camouflage and blast resistant kit into polygonal shape.

Above you can see the original design something between Street Fighters Bison and a padded UN soldier but in red instead of blue. Not my best character design I admit so I had another go. I did a bit of research this time and looked at what the latest fashions are in military apparel, added a sprinkling of sci-fi pixy dust  and came up with the second version which I was much happier with. I then want on to make the character in Z-Brush which......doesn't look anything like my concept sketch at all. This is not in any way to do with me getting distracted from my original concept, I have an iron will and would never start thinking that this character would look cool with giant spider, bionic spider legs with skulls on, with ethereal spirit aliens from dimension x riding a plinth of bones on his back....soooo anyway, below you can see the character running in Maya which is where I do all the skin weighting and rigging.

 Actually I'm getting ahead of myself I did a rough version that I had to throw away, there was a problem with the base mesh which meant I had to go back and start from scratch. I didn't get that far into the sculpting but it was still a pain at the time. I approached this model in a slightly different way to how I usually do my character models. Basically my normal method is to get a model that works properly in Maya and then take it into Z-Brush to add details. This model was created much more in Z-Brush, the idea was to take a much more loose organic approach to the modelling more like sketching in clay and then working over that to get the finished model. It did work but there was more than the usual amount of trial and error. I had some problems with skinning because when I build the mesh in Maya I have more experience and better control, got there in the end though. The below character went missing in action before he even got any colour to him. I have swapped over to xNormal for normal mapping now as it's much more consistent for creating  normal maps. Z-Brush is great for modeling but there are often problems if you use it to generate your normal maps.

 

Above is the Z-Brush model from which I generate the normal maps from. He doesn't have his giant metal cuffs on as they needed to be done as two separate models. I learned a bit more about modelling machined metal surfaces from the cuffs which I also ended up doing over, three times in the end but I guess it was worth it as I went onto you tube to track down some useful tutorials which will be useful for the future. I would still like to make a robot model at some point and have not forgotten how popular the steam punk robot design I did was.

You can see the rigg above. I accidentally left a triangulated laser gun in with the quad mesh which probably sounds like gobeldy gook to most of you. However as a result I finally got round to swapping in a rifle, just the quad version but what this means is I discovered it's very easy to swap in different rifles. I have been planning on creating a new rifle model for ages. Now I know that there is no technical problem in the way.

Above is the UV map as usual I got everything on one sheet to keep things nice and simple. That's the colour map there which you can use without any of the other maps if you want. The normal map does look great but at a distance you can drop it to save memory.

Next the wire frames, it's a slightly higher poly count for this model at 3756 but still relatively low. The rifle is relatively high at 598, another reason I've been thinking about making a new one as I reckon I can get a lower poly version that actually looks more detailed now I have more experience with Z-Brush. You can see that the cuffs are separate pieces although the mesh is one node. The cuffs are skinned with a value of 1 to a forearm joint which handles the twist you get when you rotate you wrist. I've refined the rigg on this and it's working nicely.

On to the animation set, I added a walk cycle and a jump animation to the old set so he still does all the running, strafing and death diving as before.

So there we go mission accomplished. One Space Trooper reporting for duty.